I started to cry with disappointment. It wasn't James at the front door. I knew exactly who it was.
"Dad," I called tearfully. "Daaaaaad!"
He stuck his head around the door. "Morning, love," he said. "I'll be with you in a minute. I'll make you some tea. It's just that there's a lunatic downstairs and I'd better get rid of him first."
"No, Dad," I told him. "He's not a lunatic. He's a taxi driver. Wake Anna. I bet it's her shoe."
"Oh, so she's finally bothered to come home, has she?" shouted Mum from her room.
Dad went off to Anna's room muttering "I might have known Anna would be involved in this."
Anna was duly roused. And it turned out that the man at the front door was the taxi driver who had dropped Anna home in the early hours of the morning. When he'd finished his shift he found a shoe in the back of his car. And was now
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traveling, in the manner of Prince Charming, to all the houses of the young women he had delivered home during the night, trying to match the shoe to the young woman. Anna was indeed his Cinderella.
Anna gave effusive thanks. The taxi driver left. Anna went back to bed. Dad went to work. I closed my eyes. Kate started to cry.
So did I.
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six
Wet and windy and miserable. For the first two weeks that I was home it rained every day. Apparently it was the wettest February in living memory.
I would wake in the middle of every night to the sound of the raindrops cracking and spattering at the window, drumming and pounding on the roof.
The weather made everyone miserable. Luckily I was suicidal anyway.
In fact, the weather made me feel slightly better. It seemed like Fate's way of evening up my miserable life with everyone else's happy life, if you know what I mean.
Anna and Helen lounged moodily around the house, staring longingly out the windows, wondering if it would ever stop.
Mum talked gloomily about building an ark.
Dad tried to play golf while up to his knees in water on a flooded golf course.
I spent hours just lying on my bed, staring at nothing, Kate beside me, while the rain poured down outside, steaming up the windows, turning the garden into a quagmire.
My mother would bounce into my room each morning and fling back the curtains on another gray, sodden day, and say, "Well, what's on the agenda for today?"
I knew that she was only trying to cheer me up. And I tried to be cheerful. It was just that I was so tired all the time. She would then offer to make me my breakfast, but as soon
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as she left my room I would drag myself over to the window and close the curtains again.
I didn't neglect Kate. Really, I didn't.
Well, maybe I did.
To my eternal shame Mum brought her to the doctor for her check-up. Mum drove to the supermarket and bought mounds and mounds of dis- posable diapers and baby formula and talc and bottle sterilizer and everything else that Kate needed.
In fairness to me, I didn't abandon Kate entirely. I did take care of her in lots of ways. I fed her and changed her and washed her and worried about her. Sometimes I even played with her. I just couldn't seem to do anything that involved leaving the house for her.
Getting dressed was such a huge undertaking that I never managed it. On the rare occasions that I did get out of bed I put one of Dad's golfing sweaters on over Mum's nightgown and wore a pair of hiking socks. I would genuinely intend to get dressed for real. But later.
"As soon as I've fed Kate," I would say.
But after that I would be so exhausted that I would have to lie down for a while and read a few lines of an article in Hello magazine.
After lying down for a while I might have to pee. I would spend about half an hour trying to summon the energy to go to the bathroom. It was as if I were made of lead.
Once I got to the bathroom it was all I could do to stagger back to bed again.
"I'll just lie down again for five minutes," I would promise myself, "and then I really will get dressed."
But by then it would be time to feed Kate again.
And after that I would have to lie down again, just for five minutes....
Somehow I just never got around to it.
If only I was left alone to sleep forever I would be all right. That's what I thought. But people kept bothering me.
I was lying in bed one afternoon (I don't know why I say "one after- noon"--it's not as though it wasn't a regular event) when a Neanderthal- looking young man carrying a hammer strolled into the room.
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My initial reaction was that I had been cooped up too long and had started to hallucinate.
Then Mum burst in all breathless and anxious.
It turned out that the young man had come to install a baby intercom between my bedroom and the living room. Mum had watched him like a hawk downstairs but when she had gone to answer the phone he had es- caped and made his way to my room.
Mum rushed over and forced me out of the bed as though it was the middle of the night and she was a group of secret policemen who were about to take me away and torture me. I still have her finger marks on my arms. My God, but she'd be lethal with an electric cattle prod. You see, she thought that I might give the intercom man impure thoughts if he had to work in close proximity to me while I was still in my nightgown, so it was a matter of acute urgency to get me moved as quickly as possible.
In addition to my displacement troubles with the intercom man, Helen never gave me a moment's peace. Most mornings she would stand in the bedroom doorway and look at me lying prostrate on my bed, and bellow, "Your breakfast is ready. And last one down the stairs is a big fat smelly pig!"
In an instant she would be gone, thundering back down the stairs to the kitchen, while I limply tried to tell her that I was a big fat smelly pig already. Therefore her challenge meant nothing to me.
Well, I was big and fat, that was for sure. Very watermelonesque. Well, at least I had been when I arrived in Dublin. I couldn't be certain now as I hadn't looked in a mirror or tried on any clothes since the day I left my apartment in London.
I was most certainly smelly. There was as much chance of me climbing Mount Everest as there was of me washing my hair.
I did have the occasional bath, but only because my mother organized the whole thing.
A combination of persuasion and coercion.
She would fill the bath with steaming and fragrant bubble bath so that I would smell of kiwifruit and papaya. She would put huge soft towels on the heated towel rack for me. She would offer me a loan of her lavender body lotion (ugh, no